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Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

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Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#381
post #94

Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work. I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it. Oh and of cou…

Put it this way, if the ai article is indeed so good, why store the article in a dusty long form output mode from a soon to be obsolete model? Just give us the prompt, and in 6 months with some newer, bigger, better model, we can feed that prompt and get an even better article out of it.

> Just give us the prompt

Two showstopper problems with this:

1. Many of "us" don't like interacting with LLMs more than we have to, and view reading as a pleasure that would be extinguished instantly at a chat prompt.

2. It lazily implies that the essence of an article is so easy to communicate that it can be compressed into a prompt. There's a reason for titles, subtitles, open sentences, hero images, paragraph openers, etc etc: they pull you in, establish tone and voice and so forth. Where are the prompts that can entice a reader to even skim it much less plug into their favorite chatbot?

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#382
post #42

We don't allow genai text on HN itself - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . How to enforce it is a separate question, of course, but the rule exists. We don't have a similar rule yet about article content but my sense is that the community mostly doesn't want to read it—or, to put it more conservatively, discounts it. This is why we see s…

> This has the happy flipside that anyone who would like readers to classify their article as high-status rather than low-status can apply the judo move of simply writing it themselves. I really really hope more people take up pen and paper! My last blog post [0] came with proof-of-work attached. [0] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/

>proof-of-work attached.

Doesn't seem too hard to fake now, now that AI can generate convincing videos. Failing that, it's definitely within the realm of possibility for AI to create fake pages for a notebook, then generate a blender/unreal engine project to render it.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#383
post #126
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP wrote in the parent: ".. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment. .." I am not sure why you think someone saying "not AI trust me bro" carries any merit. At any rate, like I said, I've given up the war. People enjoy r…

Your post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493096 ) might also have been downvoted for saying "Be better", which is an internet putdown trope.

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#384
post #80
post #4

Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Too many people here also think you just have to give in and accept (abuser mentality IMO).

> Considering YC invests in AI I doubt you’ll get anything of the sort. Conspiracy minded responses are low value, and yours is especially so considering HN bans AI comments.

> Conspiracy minded responses are low value

Tagging an opinion different from yours with a 1967 CIA axiom is of even lower value.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#385

Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work. I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it. Oh and of cou…

> I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago

I simply instruct my RSS Reader to fetch articles only from blogs which I believe to be high quality.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material…

This exactly. Whenever someone shows me their (or someone else's) AI-assisted-coded (vibe coded) thing, I can only ever engage with it on a very superficial level, saying "oh cool". You can't have a discussion about it, how it was done, because for 80% of cases it's "the AI did it". I don't think this is that interesting or useful for HN, because indeed it's a discussion site. It would be different if the vibe coded…

This is becoming a problem on the anti-HN (reddit). Someone will submit something cool, not disclose its status as vibecoded, and then not be able to answer any real questions about whatever it is they submitted. I don't have a problem with vibe coded software in general, but I think sharing it like that is strange. What do these people get from it? Prestige? I don't think they get any, as it's almost always clocked as vibecoded a few minutes after seeing it

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#387
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think classifying it as an allergy or a status thing is a little too glib. I’ve read and reviewed, conservatively, hundreds of AI generated documents for work, and “written”/commissioned a bunch too. My biggest issue is that it’s impossible to engage with and give feedback on an AI written document, because it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material…

You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist). Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the…

I can indeed use AI to do research on topics I learn about on HN. That’s a different activity than what I come to HN for, or when I’m reviewing a proposal for something at work, or if I’m interested in an article and want to learn more about some of the details that didn’t make the final draft from either the author or from other people with experience in the area.

“Why didn’t the author consider [this thing that seems similar]” is almost never something you can ask an llm, especially for articles where the author is putting in so little of their own effort that they don’t edit out obvious AI tells.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#388
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. I don't think this is true. I think most of the people who post LLM content without editing and without even style guidelines are simply of the opinion that the resulting text is genuinely of an acceptable quality. Agreed with the rest of your post. We should think of this in terms of quality of the result, not the process.

What upside is there to labeling your content as AI generated (except when you are showing some novel way to use AI)?

I don't know, I wasn't saying that there was an upside. Sorry if my post was unclear. My "I don't think this is true" was in response to the assertion that people who use AI would be afraid of losing credibility from labeling.

Re: Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

#389
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prejudice? You bet.

More that people want to deal with the real you.

They always have been. The real me is a person with lots of ideas but not enough executive function to make all of them a reality within my lifetime. ADHD makes it hard to even start tasks, even with medication.

LLMs essentially cured me of this particular problem, to the point I got addicted to building things and had to actively dial it back a bit because it.

As such, I consider LLMs to be assistive technology, like screen readers. LLM opponents are displaying some serious ableism.

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